Bushfires

Politicians love disasters. It should be easy brownie points. That’s why that get really pissed when someone tries to interrupt with questions about policy.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack on Monday said the Greens were “inner-city raving lunatics” for discussing climate change as fires spread across the state. “We’ve had fires in Australia since time began, and what people need now is a little bit of sympathy, understanding and real assistance – they need help, they need shelter,” the Nationals leader told ABC Radio National when asked about climate change. “They don’t need the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies at this time, when they’re trying to save their homes, when in fact they’re going out in many cases saving other peoples’ homes and leaving their own homes at risk.”

Barnaby Joyce: “I acknowledge that the two people who died were most likely people who voted for the Green party so I am not going to start attacking them, that’s the last thing I want to do,” the former Nationals leader said on Sky News. “What I wish [Greens MP Adam] Bandt would do is not try to extend this argument to political purposes … to make these spurious links, that a policy change would have stopped the fires is so insulting and just completely beyond the pale.

Mr Joyce’s controversial remarks come after Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Tuesday said politicians should not debate climate policy while emergency services conducted an “operational response”. “It’s not that people don’t think those issues are important or need to be acknowledged – whatever issue we’re talking about, it’s just going to focus our efforts on the operational response that’s what people in the crisis areas need,” he told 2GB.

The Shovel

Saying his government would do whatever it takes to fight the increasing number of fires in Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has committed an unprecedented two million thoughts and prayers per year to struggling fire departments, on top of existing thoughts and prayers already delivered.

At a press conference to announce the new initiative, Mr Morrison said the thoughts and prayers could be deployed quickly and cheaply.

“You know, while others are talking about complex, expensive initiatives like funding firefighters or addressing climate change, we’re actually putting real, practical, fully-costed measures in place today. One or two conversations with Hillsong and I can have this policy on the ground and fully delivered within a week,” he said.

It’s us against them. The liberals paint a picture of urban elites who are out of touch with the average Australian. The left is not selling these people an alternative. Instead the left doubles down on insulting them.

The “deplorables” want respect. They don’t like mining but what else are they going to do?

Speaking of insults …

The QandA feminist edition

Broad sweeping generalisations with little thought or nuance. They totally ignore that men are divided into powerful and powerless and that powerful women ie Margaret Thatcher are as much to blame.

The ABC has pulled a Q&A episode from all its platforms and investigating whether it breached editorial standards by allowing panellists to apparently advocate violence, arson and extrajudicial killings.

After a flood of complaints about Monday’s program, ABC managing director David Anderson on Thursday conceded “elements” may have been “offensive”.

ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose backed Mr Anderson’s decision to investigate the program, saying it would be removed from all ABC platforms.

“I agree with David’s statement, which I’ve discussed with him,” Ms Buttrose told The Australian. “We can’t do much more than issue the statement that we have, and we won’t be repeating the program. The plan is to take it off.”

Wokeness part 1

This is a woke form of blacking-up by Brendan O’Neill in The Australian.

… She said: “I do not have the luxury or the privilege to sit there and be civil with people who do not acknowledge my full humanity.”

In short, she’s a member of the non-privileged. And therefore she is good and you must listen to her.

There’s only one problem with this: it isn’t true.

Eltahawy has had a privileged life. And I’m using the word privilege in its true sense here. She grew up in a middle-class family in Egypt. Her parents had PhDs. They worked in medicine. They even got government grants to study and work overseas, including in Britain and Saudi Arabia.

A third of Egyptians live in extreme poverty. In contrast to them, Eltahawy grew up in great comfort. And that’s an inconvenient fact for someone who’s super keen to be a member of the woke, where being oppressed gives you moral power and social influence. So Woke Mona must pose as someone who lacks “luxury or privilege” and who cannot be expected to be polite to her detractors.

This is a woke form of blacking-up, where middle-class people self-identity (to use politically correct language) as oppressed to improve their social standing in PC circles and give themselves the right to lecture the rest of us, especially white men, about how dumb and prejudiced we are.

Wokeness part 2

David Penberthy in The Courier Mail

Wokeness part 3

How the Insufferably Woke Help Trump

Democrats are insulting and condescending to the swing-state voters they need the most.

Among the people I love is a sibling who works at Walmart cleaning toilets at night in a thinly populated part of eastern Oregon. She’s been there more than 25 years and has trouble saving a dime and certainly no path to retirement. She’s likely to vote, again, for President Trump.

No matter how much I point out that Trump is trying to take away her health care protections by litigating to kill Obamacare, that his tariffs have made it harder to pay her bills, that he is the most repulsive and creepy man ever to occupy the White House, she holds firm.

Why? One reason is what she hears from the other side. Many Democrats, she says, are dismissive of her religious beliefs and condescending of her lot in life. She’s turned off by the virtue-signaling know-it-alls.

Pearson joins advisory group to design Indigenous ‘voice’ to governments

Prominent Indigenous leader Noel Pearson, a leading proponent of constitutional recognition for Australia’s First Peoples, will join a senior advisory group tasked with overseeing the design of a “voice” to governments.

Mr Pearson, the Cape York Partnership founder, is among 17 notable Australians appointed on Friday by Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt to help develop a model that ensures Indigenous Australians are heard at all levels of government.

He joins former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner Mick Gooda, co-chair of the Joint Council on Closing the Gap Pat Turner, prominent Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, leader of the Gumatj clan of Arnhem Land and chairman of the Northern Land Council, and emerging Indigenous leader Benson Saulo. Sky News Australia presenter and columnist for The Australian, Chris Kenny, Anindilyakwa Land Council chairman Tony Wurramarrba and Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar have also been appointed.

Hmmm, and what about Noel Pearson? What can we expect of him?

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson is alleged to have called Malcolm Turnbull a “white c***”, Indigenous Minister Ken Wyatt a “black c***” and Indigenous Labor senator Pat Dodson a “f***ing black c***”, in what one witness described as an offensive tirade outside the Prime Minister’s office.

What Labor’s review says about Christians

Using the smallest areas identified by the ABS, the report finds those areas with a high proportion of the following groups were associated with a swing against Labor:

Voters aged 25-34 years living in outer-urban and regional areas;

Christians;

Coal mining communities;

Chinese Australians; and

Queenslanders.

“There is overlap between some of these groups, such as Christians living in Queensland and mine workers aged 25-34 years. However, each characteristic was an independently statistically significant contributor to the anti-Labor swing.”

“When all other variables are controlled for, voters in the 25-34 year age group swung strongly against Labor, with an estimated swing of four per cent.”

Labor reviews the lost election

From Guy Rundle in Crikey

Labor lost “because of a weak campaign that never found direction, a cluttered policy agenda, and an unpopular leader”.

Bad times, but behind the scenes it was worse. Some of the revelations are extraordinary. As this writer noted repeatedly over past years, Shorten’s tendency to surround himself with cronies would put him in a situation where effective leadership was impossible. This came to pass exactly so. Here’s about half of the review’s key findings in two paragraphs:

Dear God, how is that level of disorganisation possible?

Paul Keating said

“Working people … if they’re not sure about the economic framework, they think ‘hang on my job’s at risk’ and so they go and vote against you even though you’re actually trying to help them,” Mr Keating said.

“These are the two big issues I see, that is income inequality and the fact there is no trickle down means that working people are going to get poorer and poorer unless there’s a change in policy, and there’s only one party to do that, and that’s the Labor Party.”

The Shovel

Labor: “Our Campaign Had Too Many Messages”. Shorten: “I Reject That For The Following 17 Reasons”

OK Boomer

Teens say “ok boomer” is the perfect response because it’s blasé but cutting. It’s the digital equivalent of an eye roll. And because boomers so frequently refer to younger generations as “snowflakes,” a few teenagers said, it’s particularly hilarious to watch them freak out about the phrase.

From the ABC … it’s a response to what’s perceived to be some older people’s sense of entitlement, outdated ways of thinking, or condescending attitudes towards younger generations.

We don’t strike anymore

No one talks about strikes any more. But if you were around in the 1980s, “militant unions” and a culture of industrial disputation were always being hailed as a major problem in the Australia economy. Union power had to be curbed and workers prevented from withdrawing their labour as a tactic in industrial negotiations, we were told incessantly.

Well, it got curbed, all right. Figures released in September by the ABS showed that, for the second straight year, the number of days lost to strikes per 1000 employees in 2018-19 averaged 2.5 per quarter. It has averaged between two to three days every quarter for five years. A decade ago, it was usually over three. For most of the 2000s, it was much higher — in double digits. In 2004, 17 days per 1000 were lost. In the 1990s it was usually over 20. In the 1980s, it was 40, 50, 60, and 78 in 1985, the first year the ABS began recording data.

Strikes are now a small fraction what they were just 15 years ago. Even in construction, where the “militant” CFMMEU allegedly runs amok, the days lost on average in 2018-19 was 10.5. That would have been a quiet year when John Howard was prime minister. In mining, another CFMMEU stronghold, no strikes were recorded at all in the first two quarters of 2019. That’s some militancy.

The decline, even death, of strikes in Australia has much to do with the dramatic decline in union membership, from around 50% of the workforce in the 1970s to well under 20% now — a figure propped up by high levels of union membership in the public sector (where, coincidentally or not, health and education workers have enjoyed much better wages growth than elsewhere).

Here’s what we need to do

We need elevator pitches to explain:

The Liberals have been bad economic managers.

Neo-liberalism is a con-job by the powerful who are screwing the average Australian

AOC exposes a modern day Gilead

The lawsuit accuses the pharma company of exploiting public research dollars to make billions without giving American taxpayers their return on investment

AOC asked this pharma exec why a life-saving HIV drug costs nearly $2,000 in the U.S. and $8 in Australia

INDIGENOUS FURY AT EATERIES’ USE OF NATIVE FLORA

Bush tucker wars are raging, with indigenous Australians furiously declaring that the gastronomic growth in using native ingredients on high-end menus is simply treating sacred ingredients as a cash-grab.

Native ingredients — such as sea succulents, karkalla, saltbush, finger limes and wattle seed — are now used in a number of top Sydney restaurants.

Bundjalung man and SBS’s On Country Kitchen host Mark Olive said while he was happy such ingredients are mainstream now, he did not agree with the lack of respect some growers and sellers had for native culture. “There are non-indigenous people and businesses looking to make a quick buck from Aboriginal ingredients and that is the part I’m not OK with,” he said.

“These ingredients are an important part of indigenous culture and history and people need to know the stories behind it all.” While he was happy with farms and nurseries being run by non-indigenous people, he encouraged them to “put an ad out there to see if there are any young indigenous people … interested in horticulture and get them involved”.